“Greater New York” Is a Bellwether—And It’s Time for Critics to Eat Their Words

“Youth-besotted,” “a pineapple ice cream soda,” and “a flashpoint” aren’t exactly descriptors that encourage reverence. And “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1’s quinquennial survey of emerging New York-based artists (which unveils for the fourth time this Sunday) hasn’t exactly inspired a legion of critical camaraderie. Nor has it inspired much curatorial approval. Ironically, it was none other than Peter Eleey, the chief curator of this year’s show, who 10 years ago described it as a “flashpoint” in a Frieze Magazine review. Yet looking through the past exhibitions’ rosters, from 2000, 2005, and 2010, the majority of the participants were featured at a crucial moment in their careers, a moment when they either blasted off or faded into obscurity. And most blasted off.

Featured in the inaugural 2000 “Greater New York,” Do Ho Suh exhibited with Lehmann Maupin in September of that year, and has remained with the gallery ever since—not to mention being labelled the “Art Innovator of the Year” in 2013 by the Wall Street Journal. That same year, Shirin Neshat peeled back the New York art world’s provincial bias against Middle Eastern art (in her case, photography), as did Ghada Amer, whose sexually charged paintings would find their way into Gagosian’s hands.

Five years later, the cards were stacked similarly with Carol Bove. That year’s show also included then-rising artists Wangechi Mutu, Paul Chan, and Dana Schutz, who in 10 years time have won legions of awards and major institutional surveys.

The last go-round was anything but amiss, too. Hank Willis Thomas? You’ve heard of him. And Ryan McNamara, Rashaad Newsome, Darren Bader, and LaToya Ruby Frazier—who also just won a MacArthur Genius Grant. Yet the prevailing critical view is resoundingly scathing. As Village Voice critic Christian Viveros-Faune once spouted, “I am reminded of the words of Samuel Johnson: ‘There is nothing uglier than that on the verge of beauty.’” But beauty—and, really, self-actualization—isn’t necessarily the point of these sorts of surveys, even if this one’s title locates it in aesthetic greatness.

How can a show that helped to launch so many careers be so divisive? So much so, it seems, that the forthcoming edition has changed its focus by “bringing together emerging and more established artists,” as the official statement goes. It continues on to explain that “the city itself is being reshaped by a voracious real estate market that poses particular challenges to local artists,” calling for us to “[examine] points of connection and tension between our desire for the new and nostalgia for that which it displaces.”

In 2015, newcomers like M. Lamar and C. Spencer Yeh will be placed in context with Kiki Smith and Gordon Matta-Clark. Skeptics will doubtlessly cry cowardliness. But what do the artists of past editions and those who’ve snapped them up since their debuts at “Greater New York” think? “Critics are allowed to say what they wish, and they always will. It does not—and could never—be the definitive opinion on whether or not the original curatorial intentions are successful,” says Kat Parker, director of Petzel Gallery, which represents Schutz, as well as other GNY alums Yael Bartana and Adam McEwen (who is also reprised for this year).

There’s often a schism between critical and market reception. But “‘Greater New York’ functions, as Roberta Smith put it, as a big-ring circus,” quips Fabienne Stephan, a curator at Salon 94, which shows Jimmy DeSana—another featured in this year’s show. “I get to watch and concentrate on an act and delve in if I want to. I do look to spot talent in the show.” The gallery brought on David Benjamin Sherry after his trippy photographic self-portrait and landscape series exhibited in the 2010 edition. “That’s where I first was impressed by Huma Bhabha,” says Stephan. “The piece she had in the show, Untitled (2005), was then reinstalled in her solo exhibition at PS1 three years ago and she is participating in ‘Greater New York’ again this year, 10 years later.”

The expanded criteria for 2015’s installment—mid-career, established, and previously exhibited artists—may seem to belie the pathos of the exhibition. After all, it is, as Parker says, “always viewed as a platform for younger, largely unknown artists.” However, as Thomas says, “survey shows have their place. They revitalize energy within the art world and they take a pulse of the time.” And in the New York area, with some 140,000 practicing artists living within its five boroughs, whose median age is 38, suffice to say that many artists here aren’t exactly spring chickens.

Perhaps the “pulse of the time” is no longer so youth-focused. And “emerging,” as institutional or collecting nomenclature, may be somewhat irrelevant. As Parker puts it: “In today’s day and age, digital media has made it virtually impossible to be unknown.” Likewise, New York harbors immense talent, often much of it overlooked and under-exhibited. Digging deeper—not broader—into its landscape may actually enable “Greater New York” to shed some of its flash-in-the-pan reputation.

Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF)—a playful, punky collective that heavily integrates education into their artmaking—exhibited at PS1 in 2010 with a moveable participatory installation that “allowed students from the greater New York area to swap used pedestals for new ones,” as the group describes. “We wanted to see if we could redirect a small production budget into a more intimate relationship with other young artists.” Perhaps that’s the conversation the New York art world needs right now. Not reiterating the perpetual gripes of the rising rents or unbalanced demographics, but creating continuity and connections in a multi-generational artistic community. BHQF were excited to hear that, this year, their former professor Robert Bordo is including paintings in “Greater New York.” “He’s a painter a lot of painters know and look at deeply, but his work doesn’t have the broad audience that it deserves,” they say. “So if ‘Greater New York’ gives this work a wider platform, it’s good for everyone.”

While PS1 and MoMA have lately been reviled for their corporate pockets and distracting celebrity-chasing curatorial strategy, the artists seem not to care. “I was more excited about the relationship of my work to viewers and audiences than I was thinking about my career, which probably wasn’t the smartest move on my part,” laughs Thomas. For all the drama “Greater New York” has engendered, it’s guaranteed to garner a large audience for its current roster, which looks promising.

“The New York art scene is so large and fractured, I don’t think one museum exhibition could ever accurately represent it entirely,” Parker says, “but from the list of artists included it seems that it is reflective of work made in New York over a specific time period and which may reveal itself to be more contemporary than we anticipate.” To quote Samuel Johnson, “The future is purchased by the present.”

Ben Davis on Why ‘Greater New York’ Matters for the International Art World

Ben Davis, Friday, October 9, 2015

Share

“Greater New York” is upon us. While the massive, 157-artist show opens on October 11, the press begin their crawl Friday. It will be met, as all such surveys are now, with a flood of intensive Instragramming and insta-punditry. Here are some thoughts to keep in mind about what it all might mean—because the big show is different this year, and that difference says something about how New York is changing.

Specifically, it inaugurates a new concept: “Greater New York 2015″ is a post-“emerging art” survey.

The show began in 2000 as a way to consummate the odd-couple merger of PS1 and MoMA, welding the latter’s institutional clout with the former’s alternative vibe, limiting the range to artists to those who had their first solo shows in the last few years.

By the time its return edition opened in 2005 to coincide with the art fairs, the ever-expanding art market had already made this “emerging artist” focus feel like a visual-arts version of corporate indie rock.

“[T]his reincarnated enterprise had no way of separating itself from the market’s engorged desire for some institutional guidance among the sea of young artists now plying their wares in New York,” curator Peter Eleey wrote in Frieze of the 2005 affair. He added that “you half-expect dealers’ mobile phone numbers to show up on wall labels.”

A few years later, Eleey would join the MoMA PS1 team, and was promoted to Associate Director in 2013. He has overseen a big part of the curatorial work on this year’s show, so that decade-old review of “GNY 2005″ now reads as a negative manifesto.

“Greater New York 2015″ still presents plenty of “artists to watch.” In terms of the gallery representation of the artists involved, it seems to be pretty Lower East Side-y. The most influential art gallery here turns out to be the indie-ish 47 Canal, which shows Gregory Edwards (b. 1981), John Finneran (b. 1979), Ajay Kurian (b. 1984), and Stewart Uoo (b. 1985).

But the key number to remember is 48. That’s the average age of the participants overall. Those that are living, that is. The show contains a fair number of figures—from pioneering collage filmmaker Marie Menken (1909-1970) to the late, great Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978)—who are historical. (For “Greater New York” back in 2010, the average age would have been 34, by my calculations.)

In terms of demographics, there are more artists who are either Gen Xers (1965-1984) or Baby Boomers (1946-1964) than Millennials. Heck, there’s a significant Greatest Generation contingent.

The “Greater New York” press release makes it clear that the changes in the focus of the show are the result of double pressures: the need to figure out what such a survey does in the age of constant art fairs, with their constant volleys of new product (reflecting Eleey’s long-ago criticism of “GNY 2005”); and the need to be faithful to the wave of nostalgia for New York’s wilder days triggered by “a voracious real estate market that poses particular challenges to local artists.” (It could be clearer that the real-estate boom and the art-boom are two halves of the same whole, so that what lifts art up with one hand pushes it down with the other.)

This year’s “Greater New York” feels like its curators have added a question mark to the end of the title. I’m eager to see how it feels overall, but this in itself already says something about this prickly and soul-searching moment.

===

ART NEWS

‘Thinking from the Present Allowed Us to Get to the Past’: Peter Eleey Talks the New Embrace of Old Work in ‘Greater New York’

“How does an artist live in New York City in 2015?” asked MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, clad in a velour jacket in the foyer of that museum, addressing a few dozen art reporters. Perhaps this was a rhetorical question (no one volunteered a response) but it also serves as a way of approaching the institution’s newest show, unveiled Friday morning: “Greater New York,” a series that pops up at PS1 every five years and has in its last three iterations acted as a CliffNotes guide to what young artists who live in the five boroughs are up to these days.

Except, this time around, the old guard has come along for the ride, too: the list of 150 artists included in the gigantic, ambitious show, which opens to the public on Sunday, has a fair number of established names, some of whom have achieved levels of success that surely would have barred them from “Greater New York” shows in the past.(How does an artist live in New York in 2015? Glenn Ligon lives in a TriBeCa apartment “around the corner from movie stars,” as his text-based work in the show, Housing in New York: A Brief History, 1960-2007, explains.)

But even if show-goers are greeted by the work of 72-year-old David Hammons outside, and a piece by the 62-year-old James Nares upon entering, there are plenty of standout offerings from young artists, including the glowing metropolis of e-cigarettes constructed by Ajay Kurian (age 30), the randy figurative sculpture of Elizabeth Jaeger (age 27), and the playful market prankings of Cameron Rowland (age 27).

After the press conference, we caught up quickly with Peter Eleey, the PS1 associate director who led the curatorial team, to speak about the new tack for “Greater New York.”ARTnews: How do you think the inclusion of older artists and older works of art has made “Greater New York” more effective, in terms of its original aims?Peter Eleey: The show was conceived of as a show that would survey a broad base of creative practice in New York City, an emergent portrait of New York and the creative community over the last five years. Particularly in the last five years, it’s felt like older artists—or, let’s say, history in general—has entered the present in a way that, to us, felt hard to exclude. Younger artists kept talking to us about it, we kept seeing it in the way they wanted to contextualize their works. In a way, it was thinking from the present that allowed us to get to the past.I know that you’ve discussed how you would have done past ‘Greater New York’ exhibitions differently. I believe you had some complaints regarding the 2005 edition in particular. And then, when I was walking upstairs, I saw a work titled Lesser New York [by Fia Backstrom].Ha, yes that’s right.It was purposefully rejected from that “Greater New York” in 2005…Yes it was!And now, here it is, in the institution instead of fighting it. Is that commentary on how this “Greater New York” is different from past iterations? It just struck me as funny, that you would go and put it in after its original exclusion.When you go through the show, there are certain moments that touch on histories of both inclusion and exclusion in the institution’s past. There’s a number of artists who appeared in the “Rooms” exhibition that Alanna Heiss organized to inaugurate this institution. With [Lesser New York], we wanted to engage the recent past, not just a deeper history, and that was a way to do that.The show coincides with the announcement that admission to PS1 is going to be free for all New Yorkers, which is quite amazing.It really is.Is there some aspect of this show that is trying to speak to the kinds of New Yorkers who wouldn’t usually come to MoMA PS1 if there were a high price to get in? With the free admission, do you see any sort of populist mission here? We always want a broader audience than we have. Every place I’ve worked has strived to achieve that. I think for us, part of the decision around trying to make admission free for people across the five boroughs was another way that we can expand that sort of access. We’re privileged to be an outer-borough institution because we get a different kind of audience. That includes the tourism audience, for sure, and while we’re very glad about that, it also very much includes people from the artist communities in North Brooklyn and even Long Island City.Do you think these new kinds of visitors will be affected by this show in particular?Yes, to the extent that we have occasions to reflect on a version of the city that’s bigger than the art world, it’s always nice for us to take that. When I organized that show about 9/11 four years ago, I was doing something similar, and expanding the kinds of stories that might reach different sorts of audiences.

Every five years the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 team up to take the pulse of New York City’s contemporary art scene, filling the latter institution with works made recently by artists based in the metropolitan area. The fourth edition of this quinquennial exhibition, Greater New York — which opens to the public on Sunday — diverts palpably from the formula, mixing works by younger artists with pieces by older and deceased artists. Eighties babies are well-represented — including Kevin Beasley, Liene Bosquê, Sara Cwynar, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Ajay Kurian, Eric Mack, and Stewart Uoo — as are the dearly departed: an entire room is devoted to Alvin Baltrop’s photographs of the Hudson River piers in the 1980s; a half-dozen of Scott Burton‘s rarely-seen sculptural furniture objects are on view; and visionary architect Lebbeus Woods‘s designs and drawings command a corner room on the third floor. The exhibition’s film program includes News from Home (1976) by the just-deceased auteur Chantal Akerman.

Thought not rooted in photography, Glenn Ligon‘s “Housing in New York: A Brief History, 1960–2007” (2007), a set of silkscreens chronicling the artist’s real estate pitfalls, takes up many of the same issues of gentrification, discrimination, and inequality. In the adjacent gallery, a group of fantastic images spanning 1976 to 2008, by street photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon, make a perfect companion piece to Ligon’s history project.

Another popular formal trope is the collection: pieces that consist of large numbers of similar objects, assortments of disparate and seemingly unrelated things, or actual spring and fall fashion collections. Greater New York features installations showcasing clothes and accessories designed by the collectives Eckhaus Latta, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, and renaissance woman Susan Cianciolo. In one gallery, Nancy Shaver‘s colorful collections of found objects and baubles are installed alongside Sara Cwynar‘s photographic assemblages of matching found images — snapshots of the Acropolis, reproductions of Piet Mondrian paintings, etc. Liene Bosquê‘s tabletop sculptural installation, “Recollection” (2000–15), is an urban grid made up of hundreds of souvenir architectural miniatures, a kind of kitsch update of Rem Koolhaas’s “The City of the Captive Globe” (1972). The most literal manifestation of the collection trend, however, comes from KIOSK, a collective founded by husband-and-wife duo Marco Romeny and Alisa Grifo. Their installation, titled simply “KIOSK” (2005–15), features objects of all sorts that were gathered by the duo and several dozen contributors from all over the globe installed in translucent shelves that have turned an entire gallery into a delightful maze full of odd trinkets tucked into nooks and corners. Like the exhibition in miniature, it includes both delightful tchotchkes and uninteresting trinkets.

These recurring motifs, along with some very strong video works by Loretta Fahrenholz, Charles Atlas, and others, plus a vast gallery devoted entirely to large figurative sculptures, provide some of Greater New York‘s strongest moments. To be sure, there are plenty of duds here, too — like Gregory Edwards, Robert Bordo, John Finneran, Collier Schorr, and Yoshiaki Mochizuki, to name some names. But there’s also more than enough work, both new and old, to refute the claims of any jaded artists that New York’s days as a great art city are over.